CSE 171: User Interface Design: Social and
Technical Issues9. Some Social and Ethical Issues

This chapter of the class notes discusses a number of social and ethical
issues, beginning with a quick overview of the sociology of technology (and
science) and one of its most relevant approaches, called Actor-Network Theory.
There are also some notes on the Afterword of Shneiderman's text.

Social Theories of Technology and Science

A sociological understanding of technology (and science, which cannot
really be separated from technology) must concern itself with what engineers
and scientists actually do, which is often different from what they say they
do. This is a special case of a very general problem in anthropology and
ethnography, called the say-do problem. Among the factors that produce
this discrepency are tacit knowledge, false memory syndrome, and the myths
that all professions have about their work; very often the discrepency is
not a deliberate deception. Tacit knowledge is knowledge of
how to do something, without the ability to say how we do it. Instances are
very common in everyday life and in professional life; for example, few people
can describe how they tie their shoes, brush their teeth, or organize their
schedule. As an illustration, numerous case studies have shown that a large
part of "routine" office work actually consists of handling exceptions, i.e.,
of doing things that by definition are not routine; but if you ask (for
example) a file clerk what he does, you will get only a description of the
most routine activities.

The ubiquity the say-do problem has very serious methodological
implications for sociologists: in many cases they cannot just ask informants
to tell them the answers to the questions that they really want to have
answered; however, sometimes sociologists can ask other questions, and then
use their answers to get at what they really want to know. Thus designing good
questionaires is a delicate art, that must take account of how people tend to
respond to various kinds of question.

In fact, much of today's sociology has a statistical flavor, being based on
questionaires, structured interviews, and various kinds of demographics.
While this seems to work rather well for selling soap and politicians, it will
not help very much with understanding how technologies relate to society. In
general, better answers can be obtained in an interview if very specific
questions are asked, and if the researcher is immersed in the concrete details
of a particular project; general questions tend to produce general answers,
which are often misleading or wrong - though of course the same can happen
with specific questions. Concrete details are often much more useful than
statistical summaries.

Notes on Actor-Network Theory

Actor-network theory (abbreviated ANT), which was initiated by Bruno
Latour and Michel Callon in France, is an important recent approach to the
sociology of science and technology. The sociological angle is expressed by
one of Latour's favorite slogans, "follow the actors", which means
that the sociologist should not only look at what the actors do, but should
also be interested in what interests them, and (more doubtfully) even believe
what they believe. Actor-network theory focuses attention on the
socio-technical networks that engineers and scientists create to get
their projects done, emphasizing that no one acts alone (or if they do, then
no one notices, so it doesn't matter). In contrast to most other work in
sociology, actor-network theory does not distinguish (very much) between
"human" and "non-human" actors. In my opinion, this is more of a rhetorical,
or even dramatic, device than a theoretical axiom, but it certainly serves to
bring forward the important roles played by resources of all kinds, including
equipment, data, money, publicity, and power, and it is a useful
counterbalance to approaches that concentrate on just one of the two. The
neologism actant is sometimes used as a neutral way to refer to both
human and non-human actors, avoiding the strong human bias in the word
"actor."

Latour's view that people and machines should be treated as equal is called
the Principle of Symmetry, and it is sometimes applied in ways that may
be surprising. For example, he says we need to negotiate with
machines just as with people, we need to recruit them as
allies, to authorize and notify them, and to
mobilize and delegate them; he claims that this kind of
language should be taken literally not metaphorically. Of course,
this is opposite to what most philosophers (and ordinary people) think.
Perhaps these terms seem strange because they are so anthropomorphic (i.e.,
human centered). Personally, I consider them mainly as suggestive metaphors.
What do you think?

Latour's book Aramis is the sad story of a project to build a highly
innovative public transport system in the suburbs of Paris; the story is sad
because the project fails, and the Aramis system is left without any friends.
In this book, Latour claims that only in successful projects can you figure
out what actually happened; this is perhaps a bit shocking. Does objectivity
really only exist for successful projects? This strange viewpoint comes from
his requirement that you (as the researcher) should take the viewpoint of the
actors, plus the observation that the actors will not agree among themselves
about what happened when the project failed, due to the dissolution of the
alliances recruited to create the project in the first place.

Another piece of Latour's unusual terminology is continous chains of
translation, which refers to the ever ongoing efforts to keep actors
involved with the project, by "translating" into their own languages and
values. This is part of his effort to overcome technological
determinism, which is the (false!) theory that technology is an autonomous
force that directly changes society. For example, the very common phrase
"social impact" embodies this false viewpoint. (To say that technological
determinism is false is not to deny that technology has social effects -
instead, it is to deny that one can ignore the social context of technology.)
Latour sometimes refers to (instances of) technological determinism as "heroic
narratives of technological innovation," since particular examples (e.g.,
newspaper and magazine articles on the history of technology) are often framed
in such terms. In case you are doubtful that technological determinism can be
a problem, here are some examples. Probably we've all heard the aphorism "If
you build a better mousetrap, then the world will beat a path to your door."
A while ago in the local paper, I saw the sentences "Cloning is inevitable
once it is possible" and "Fusion power just doesn't have the impetus to
succeed." These articles were written as if the projects involved had nothing
to do with their context of people and other things, but had a momentum of
their own.

The word mediate is sometimes used for the role of intermediate
actants in these chains of translation; this terminology provides a nice way
to avoid the deterministic bias of the more usual ways of speaking of the role
of (for example) a machine, a paper record, or a technology, in some project
or part of a project.

In Aramis, Latour says (pp.99, 101):

The only way to increase a project's reality is to compromise, to
accept sociotechnological compromises.

The pertinent question is not whether it's a matter of technology or
society, but only what is the best sociotechnological compromise.

These quotations not only deny the separability of the social and the
technical (even munging them into a single word), but they also make the same
point as mentioned above, about the necessity for translations. Once all
these translations, or recuitments, succeed, the technology
"disappears", i.e., it becomes "transparent" and can be taken for granted.
But if the translations fail to "interest" the actors enough, then the actors
will go their own ways again, each with a different view of what the project
is (or was) about.

That's why ... it [i.e., the project] can never be fixed once and
for all, for it varies according to the state of the aliances. (p.106)

... each element ... can become either an autonomous element, or everything,
or nothing, either the component or the recognizable part of a whole. (p.107)

Note that this way of thinking has the effect of overcoming technological
determinism.

I would like to step outside this exposition of classical ANT for a moment
to emphasize a feature that is usually quickly passed over. Notice that
translation, mediation, or recruitment involves values in a crucial
way, since the point is to "interest" the actors by appeal to their own
values, using their own languages. This way of thinking about socio-technical
systems includes a clear understanding of the fact that many different value
systems and languages may be involved, and that communication is likely to be
happening in all of them. For non-human actants, these languages and values
may be technical, e.g., gears have some number of teeth per meter, and need
oil (note that politics is sometimes described using similar metaphors of
gears and oil!). My belief is that these values are the key to understanding
how any given system actually works.

An important methodological point is that, since values show up along the
links between actants, we can use this as a guide in seeking to understand a
socio-technical system: we should look for the values of actants by asking
what translations are being done to maintain each link in the network.

On page 108 of Aramis, Latour argues that the "division of labor"
into subprojects (and other aspects of projects) can only be made after a
project has succeeded (I called this the retrospective hypothesis in Requirements Engineering as the
Reconciliation of Technical and Social Issues). This may sound like
a radical view, but it is what you see in real projects, and quotes from
Latour's interviews with Aramis project participants, as well as my own
experience with other projects, back this up empirically. Pages 118 to 120
contrast VAL (a different French public transportation project that actually
succeeded) with Aramis, arguing that VAL can be described "heroically" only
because it succeeded. More significantly, Latour also argues that VAL
succeeded because it continued to compromise, whereas Aramis failed because it
did not continue to compromise.

The more a technological project progresses, the more the role of
technology decreases, in relative terms. (p.126)

To study Aramis after 1981, we have to add to the filaments of its network
a small number of people representing other interests and other goals: elected
officials, Budget Office authorities, economists, evaluators, ... (p.134)

A single context can bring about contrary effects. Hence the idiocy of the
notion of "preestablished context." The people are missing; the work of
contextualization is missing. The context is not the spirit of the times,
which would penetrate all things equally. (p.137)

In fact, the trajectory of a project depends not on the context but on the
people who do the work of contextualizing. (p.150)

In particular, Latour denies that sociology can ever attain a viewpoint that
is "objective," above and beyond the viewpoints of the participants, and he
even denies that there can be any "metalanguage" in which to express such a
viewpoint. This is a very different viewpoint from that of classical
sociology, but it is in full agreement with ethnomethodology.

Does there really exist a causal mechanism known only to the
sociologist that would give the history of a technological project the
necessity that seems so cruelly lacking? No, the actors offer each other a
version of their own necessities, and from this they deduce the strategies
they ascribe to each other. (p.163)

The actors create both their society and their sociology, their language
and their metalanguage. (p.167)

There are as many theories of action as there are actors. (p.167)

To the multiplicty of actors a new multiplicity is now added: that of the
efforts made to unify, to simplify, to make coherent the multiplicity of
viewpoints, goals, and desires, so as to impose a single theory of action.
(p.167-8)

To study technological projects you have to move from a classical sociology
- which has fixed frames of reference - to a relativistic sociology - which
has fluctuating referents. (p.169)

With a technological project, interpretations of the project cannot be
separated from the project itself, unless the project has become an object.
(p.172)

This is the only case where "classical" sociology might apply, and even then
only in a relative way.

By multiplying the valorimeters that allow them to measure the tests in store
and to prove certain states of power relations, the actors manage to achieve
some notion of what they want. By doing their own economics, their own
sociology, their own statistics, they do the observer's work ... They make
incommensurable frames of reference once again commensurable and translatable.
(p.181)

(The neologism "valorimeter" just refers to some way of measuring how well an
actor's requirements are being met; examples are passenger flow, cost,
publicity, etc.)

The interpretations offered by the relativist actors are performatives.
They prove themselves by transforming the world in conformity with their
perspective on the world. By stabilizing their interpretation, the actors end
up creating a world-for-others that strongly resembles an absolute world with
fixed reference points. (p.194)

(Performatives are speech acts that actually "perform" what they say,
i.e., they cause it to be the case; standard examples are christening and
marrying; this term comes from speech act theory.)
Latour claims that technologists, in doing their jobs, are actually doing
better sociology than classical sociologists.

It is interesting to contrast the view of ANT with the "dead mechanical
universe" of classical mechanics; the ANT universe is very much alive, full of
actors and their actions, full of all kinds of interactions, that are
constantly reconfiguring the network. Hence this is a very non-classical
point of view.

Actor-network theory can also be seen as a systematic way to bring out the
infrastructure that is usually left out of the "heroic" (or
"hagiographic") accounts of scientific and technological achievements, that
are unfortunately so common. Newton did not really act alone in creating the
theory of gravitation: he needed observational data from the Astronomer Royal,
John Flamsteed, he needed publication support from the Royal Society and its
members (most especially Edmund Halley), he needed the geometry of Euclid, the
astronomy of Kepler, the mechanics of Galileo, the rooms, lab, food, etc. at
Trinity College, an assistant to work in the lab, the mystical idea of action
at a distance, and more, much more (see the book on Newton by Michael White
listed on the CSE 275 homepage).
The same can be said of any scientific or technological project: a network is
needed to support it. Other famous examples of heroic narratives in
technology and science for which there exist good actor network studies which
take a non-heroic view emphasizing infrastructure include Edison's invention
of the electric light bulb and Pasteur's work on bacteria.

For what it's worth, here is my own brief outline summary of some of the
main ideas of ANT:

There is an emphasis on networks and links, as opposed to
heroic individual "genuises".

The nodes in these networks, called actants, include not just
humans, but also non-humans, such as physical objects; they all do some kind
of work to maintain the integrity of the network.

Individual actants, and groups of actants, in general have different
value systems, so that translation among these systems is necessary
for a network to succeed; this work is done along the links in the network.
Socio-technical compromise is the work done to bring the various
technical and social nodes into alignment.

The structure of a project can only be seen clearly when these
translations (and hence the project) have been successful; hence the values,
and even the parts and structure, of a failed project are not in general well
defined.

The human actors in a project are in a sense sociologists, because they
must do acts of interpretation, which in effect are theories of the
project; this work should be taken very seriously by sociologists, who should
not assume that their own views are necessarily superior to those of the
actual participants.

It should not be thought that applying ANT consists of just drawing a
graph with some actants on nodes; the work that is done must be explored, and
the nature of the relations and values involved must be explored - often the
translations involved yield very interesting data; possibilities for
multiplicity and for dynamic adaptation should be explored; etc.

An important achievement of actor-network theory is that technological and
social determinism are impossible if you use its method and language
correctly. Of course, ANT has been much criticized, but (in my opinion) much
of the criticism has been from people who either didn't understand it, or who
rejected it for failure to conform with their own prefered paradigm. The most
valid criticisms should come from within this new paradigm. One criticism is
that ANT dehumanizes humans by treating them equally with non-humans; it is
said that a brave new world is coming our way that involves more and more
interaction with machines, to the point of our becoming cyborgs, but (they
say) we should resist it rather than celebrate it. Another criticism is that
ANT fails to provide explanations for the dynamic restructuring of networks.
It is also said that ANT fails to take account of the effects that technology
can have on those who are not part of the network that produces it, and that
it therefore fails to support value judgements on the desirability or
undesirability of such effects. ANT is also criticized for its disinclination
(or inability) to make contributions to debates about policy for technology
and science. Some other criticisms can be found in Traduction/Trahison -
Notes on ANT by John Law, and in How things (actor-net)work:
Classification, magic and the ubiquity of standards by Geoffrey Bowker
and Susan Leigh Star, which are discussed in Sections 7.2 and 7.3, respectively, of the CSE 275 class notes (these papers can
also be fetched online via the readings page of CSE 275).

Another criticism, which seems mostly to come from curmudgeonly physical
scientists, and which in fact applies to most work in the sociology of
technology and science (abbreviated STS) is that it destroys the
credability of science, by leaving no place for the objective truth that
science (allegedly) uncovers. This is discussed in detail in Section 6.2 of the CSE 275 class notes, along with the fact that
by the nature of their work, sociologists of science should deliberately avoid
making commitments of this kind.

ANT is part of an area of STS that is often called constructivist,
because it focuses on how social systems get constructed by their
participants. The developers of ANT (Latour and Callon) have recently
declared that ANT is over, but of course it's too late now for them to stop
others from using, criticizing, and modifying their ideas.

A name for the general method of looking for what supports a technical or
scientific project, instead of telling a heroic tale, is called
infrastructural inversion (this term is due to Geoff Bowker). Its
converse, which is burying the infrastructure, I call infrastructural
submersion. The work of lab technicians, secretaries, nurses, janitors,
computer system administrators, etc. is very often subjected to
infrastructural submersion, with the effect of creating a very misleading
picture of the network involved; this is of course related to the heroic
narratives of classical sociology.

Leigh Star has defined boundary objects to be data objects or
collections that are used in more than one way by different social groups, and
that therefore provide an interface for those groups, translating across their
differences. One reason this idea is important is that it provides a model of
cooperation that does not require consensus. The notion of translation used
here comes from ANT. Boundary objects would seem to be especially relevant
for studying many social issues in computer science, and should have
interesting applications to many design problems.

So What?

It seems that one can see certain errors repeated again and again in
information technology businesses. One of these is making an overly ambitious
and overly precise business plan, and then trying to stick to it to the bitter
end. This is particularly common in startups, which by their nature are often
committed to going all out after an ambitious goal. But what we have learned
from actor network theory suggests that business plans should avoid being
overly committed and precise, and instead should include contingency planning:
they should sketch and cost out the scenarios that at that time seem the most
plausible, and explicitly budget for replanning at a certain point, where the
most plausible scenarios will again be sought. We all know that IPOs are a
gamble, and that this gamble usually fails; this empirical fact can be seen as
very strong support for the impossibility of making precise predictions about
interactions between society and technology.

Anyone who has worked in the computer industry, and especially in software
development, will have seen many instances of the phenomena described by actor
network theory, and will also have seen many instances of the kinds of myth
and foolishness that it is capable of exposing, including naive optimism,
hagiography, and technological determinism. In my opinion, a careful
contemplation of actor network theory, including a number of good case studies,
would be excellent preparation for high technology managers, and should be
required for all engineering students.

Much more information about the sociology of technology and science,
and especially information technology, can be found in the class notes and
readings for my course CSE 275.

Notes on the "Afterward" of Shneiderman

It is very unusual to find something like this in a computer science
textbook. Can you imagine it in a book on operating systems, or compilers?
Most of this section is interesting, and some of it is inspiring. However, I
would like to add two caveats: some material is a bit outdated, for example,
plagues 2, 3 and 7; and Shneiderman does not sufficiently recognize the ways
in which social and technical issues are intertwined. The latter point should
be corrected by the material on actor-network theory given previously in these
notes.

As far as hopes and visions go, why not hope for world peace, universal
human rights, adequate food, shelter and clothing for all on the planet, and
happiness and a balanced state of mind for all? Of course, such hopes serve to
emphasize the fact that these are primarily social issues, in which user
interface design in the narrow sense can have little impact. But if we take
user interface design in the broader sense suggested by semiotics, in which
almost anything can be seen as an interface, this objection disappears,
although we may be left feeling daunted by the magnitude of the tasks that are
implied, both theoretical (how can we develop semiotics further in ways that
will make it more useful for such goals?) and practical (how can we make some
real progress towards such goals?). At present we can only make some small
steps in these directions, but I agree with Shneiderman that we should keep in
mind large scale goals and visions as we stumble forward.

Shneiderman's relate-create-deonate cycle seems an excellent model
for system development. The fact that this model applies well beyond user
interface development is illustrated by the success of Linux and many other
open source products, and of course it can also be very valuable in education,
as Shneiderman notes.

Certainly user interface designers can expect to come face to face with
many important moral issues in their work; indeed, I would go so far as to
claim that designing "good" interfaces is already a moral issue. One need
only think of UID for medical systems, nuclear reactors, and defense systems
to see that there are important applications with moral dimensions. But even
more prosaic applications raise similar issues; e.g., consider the design of
web search engines. A semiotic study of some ethical aspects of search
engines can be found in The
Ethics of Databases, and the course CSE 175: Social and Ethical Aspects of
Information Technology, goes into ethical aspects of information
technology in some detail.

Media and the Ubiquity of Interfaces.

User interface issues appear everywhere. A coffee cup is an interface
between the coffee and the user; questions like how thick the cup should be,
what its volume should be, and whether it should have a handle, are all user
interface issues. A book can be considered a user interface to its content;
note that a book is interactive, because users turn the pages, and can go to
any indicated page they want; they also use indices, glossaries, etc in an
interactive manner. Buildings can be seen as providing interfaces for getting
to a certain room, e.g. by using a directory in the lobby, buttons outside and
inside elevators, "EXIT" signs, doorknobs, stairways, and even corridors (you
make choices with your body - not your mouse). Returning to the obvious,
medical instruments have user interfaces (for doctors, nurses, and even
patients) that can have extreme consequences if badly designed. By perhaps
stretching your mind a bit, almost anything can be seen as a user interface,
having its own issues of design and representation. Certainly this is the way
Andersen views his museum.

Of course, all this is quite parallel to what semiotics says about signs,
and indeed such issues can be considered a part of semiotics, although the
notion of semiotic morphism is often needed in making the translation. The
basic idea is to consider an object, such as a cup or a building, as a
composite sign. Here are some further concepts that are useful:

A medium expresses dimensions within which signs can vary; for
example, TV is a 2D pixel array, with a certain possible range of intensity
and color, plus a monophonic audio channel, with a certain possible range of
frequencies, etc.

A genre is a collection of conventions for using a medium; these
can be seen as further delimiting a sign system. For example, the daily
newspaper is a genre within the medium of multisection collections of large
size pages. Soap operas are a genre for TV. Obviously, genres have
subgenres; e.g., soap operas about rich families.

Multimedia are characterized by multiple simultaneous perceptual
channels. So TV is multimedia. As are (in a weak sense) books with pictures,
and cartoons.

Interactive media allow inputs as well as outputs. So PCs are a
medium that is (potentially) multimedia and interactive. The web provides (at
least one) genre within this medium; email is another. Each web browser can
be seen as providing a semiotic morphism from HTML into the capabilities of a
particular computer on which it is running.

Andersen's museum is a multimedia interactive system (and so is any
other museum, though in a more prosaic sense). I would to emphasize that the
notion of genre is social, whereas that of medium is technical. In discussing
real examples, it is difficult (or impossible) to separate media from genres,
i.e., to separate the technical from the social, in particular, because a
medium without conventions for its use will be difficult or impossible to use.

I would also like to emphasize the ethical dimensions inherent in all
genres. For example, detective novels typically reinforce values of truth and
justice.